At the Dukla Pass

On the morning of 6 October 1944, at around eight o’clock, the first soldiers of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps, together with units of the Soviet 38th Army, crossed the Dukla Pass in the Low Beskids (PL) and set foot on the soil of pre-war Czechoslovakia. The first place taken on the Slovak side was the village of Vyšný Komárnik. From then on Soviet and Czechoslovak troops were fighting in north-eastern Slovakia. Crossing the border was not, however, a breakthrough, but a stage – a whole month behind schedule – in one of the bloodiest operations in the Carpathians: under the original plan these soldiers were to have reached Prešov by the fifth day of the offensive, yet they entered Slovakia only after twenty-nine days.

A plan to help the uprising

The reason for the operation was the Slovak National Uprising, which broke out on 29 August 1944 as the Wehrmacht was entering Slovakia. The insurgents gained control of the central part of the country, centred on Banská Bystrica, but were unable to hold eastern Slovakia: two divisions of the Slovak army, which were to have opened the passes through the Carpathians to the Red Army, were disarmed by the Germans in the first days. On 31 August the Czechoslovak government-in-exile appealed to Moscow for military help.

The front then lay at the foot of the Carpathians. The great Lwów–Sandomierz offensive of the 1st Ukrainian Front, commanded by Marshal Ivan Konev, had pushed the fighting beyond the San and the Wisłoka; Soviet tanks had reached the outskirts of Krosno back in July, but there the offensive had petered out. On 2 September the Stavka ordered Konev to prepare a thrust from the Krosno area through Dukla and the Dukla Pass towards Prešov, combined with an attack by General Ivan Petrov’s 4th Ukrainian Front further east. Soviet historiography called the whole the East Carpathian operation (8 September – 28 October 1944), and its part in the 1st Ukrainian Front’s sector the Carpathian–Dukla operation (PL); Polish literature also uses the name Dukla–Prešov operation.

The main blow was delivered by the 38th Army of Colonel General Kirill Moskalenko, reinforced by the 25th Tank Corps, the 1st Guards Cavalry Corps and the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. The latter, formed in the USSR in the spring of 1944 from Czechoslovak units that had been fighting alongside the Red Army since 1943, numbered some 16,000 men – Czechs and Slovaks, but also many Rusyns from Carpathian Ruthenia, and Jews. It was commanded by Brigadier General Jan Kratochvíl (PL). The task seemed feasible, since the planners counted on friendly divisions waiting on the Slovak side of the mountains and on the Germans having few forces in the Carpathians.

A month of fighting for a few dozen kilometres

The offensive began on 8 September and from the first day met far stronger resistance than expected. The German 1st Panzer Army of General Gotthard Heinrici had used August to fortify the hills and valleys of the Low Beskids, which became part of the so-called Karpatenfestung, the rear of the Árpád Line held further east by the Hungarians. After disarming the Slovak divisions, the Germans also quickly occupied the passes that were supposed to be open. Krosno was taken on 11 September, but after that the front moved forward a kilometre or two at a time. The Czechoslovak corps, committed to battle on 9 September, suffered heavy losses in the first days; Konev judged Kratochvíl’s leadership incompetent and on 10 September handed the corps to Brigadier General Ludvík Svoboda, until then commander of the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Brigade.

The heaviest fighting was for the heights commanding the road from Dukla to Nowy Żmigród, above all Hill 534 near Iwla, which according to various accounts changed hands more than a dozen and even over twenty times. Dukla fell on 21 September, Tylawa on 23 September, and the hill at Chyrowa only on 29 September. In the valleys between Głojsce, Iwla, Chyrowa and Kapišová dozens of tanks clashed; the place was later named the Valley of Death (PL). From 30 September the fighting moved up to the pass itself near Barwinek. The Czechoslovak tank brigade, attacking along the road on the valley floor, lost practically all its tanks in these days. On the morning of 6 October the pass and the old border were finally crossed, but bitter fighting in the area continued until about 10 October.

The entry into Slovakia did not open the way into the interior of the country. The Germans fell back to further fortified positions, and the Soviet–Czechoslovak advance continued to make slow, hard progress: Svidník was taken on 28 October, and the German strongpoint on Hill 532 (Obšár) near the pass only on 25 November. Prešov, which was to have been reached on the fifth day of the operation, was taken by Soviet troops in January 1945.

The cost

The Dukla operation was one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War on the territory of present-day Poland and Slovakia. The figures vary according to the time frame and area taken into account. Polish regional studies (among them Wojciech Krukar and Paweł Luboński’s guide to the Low Beskids) give, for the fighting from 8 September to the end of November, about 123,000 killed, wounded and missing on the Soviet side, about 6,500 on the Czechoslovak side (including nearly 2,000 killed) and nearly 70,000 on the German and Hungarian side. Other tallies speak of more than 70,000 killed and wounded on both sides in the battle for the pass alone. Thousands of the fallen lie in the war cemeteries at Dukla, at Barwinek and at Vyšný Komárnik in Slovakia.

The Polish side of the pass

Before the soldiers reached the border, they had fought for a month on Polish soil – in the districts of Krosno and Jasło, in the small town of Dukla and in villages many of which were inhabited by Lemkos. The front rolled over Iwla, Chyrowa, Tylawa, Barwinek and the neighbouring hamlets twice: first as artillery fire and air raids, then as a struggle for every hill. Before the front arrived, the Germans expelled inhabitants and forced them to dig fortifications, and many villages were almost entirely destroyed in the fighting. Dukla itself was largely in ruins. Minefields and unexploded ordnance went on killing local people for years after the war.

In nearby Iwonicz-Zdrój a Home Army unit had taken control of the spa and its surroundings as early as 26 July, creating the so-called Iwonicz Republic (PL), which lasted until the Red Army arrived in September. This was happening at a time when the Uprising was under way in Warsaw, while in the areas liberated by the Red Army power was being taken over by structures subordinate to the PKWN (the Polish Committee of National Liberation) and the NKVD, which began disarming and arresting Home Army soldiers. The halting of the front at Dukla and on the Wisłoka also meant that Jasło, a dozen or so kilometres away, remained in German hands until January 1945; in the autumn of 1944 the Germans expelled its inhabitants and systematically destroyed the town.

The end of the war did not settle the fate of the Lemko population of the area. In 1945–1946 most Lemkos were resettled, in many cases under pressure, to Soviet Ukraine, and the rest were deported in 1947, in Operation Vistula, to Poland’s western and northern territories.

Slovakia, Czechoslovakia and the battle’s place in the war

The operation failed to achieve its main objective. While the Soviet armies and the Czechoslovak corps were fighting their way through the first Slovak villages, German forces went over to the offensive against the insurgent territory; at the end of October the insurgents lost Banská Bystrica, and the remnants of their army turned to partisan warfare in the mountains. The link-up with them across the Carpathians never happened. Historians debate whether the main causes were a poor assessment of the strength of the German defences and the failure of the plan for the Slovaks to seize the passes, or whether Moscow was unwilling to commit to helping the uprising forces it could use in other directions – above all in Hungary, where on that same day, 6 October, the great Battle of Debrecen was beginning. Soviet and communist Czechoslovak historiography, by contrast, stressed that the operation liberated western Ukraine and opened the way to the liberation of Czechoslovakia.

For Czechs and Slovaks, Dukla became a symbol. In communist Czechoslovakia 6 October was celebrated as Czechoslovak Army Day, and the name Dukla was borne by the army sports club in Prague and by many streets and housing estates. Ludvík Svoboda, who led the corps through the pass, became minister of national defence in the government formed in Košice in April 1945, and from 1968 to 1975 was President of Czechoslovakia. In Slovakia 6 October is today a day of remembrance for the victims of Dukla, and above the pass stand a memorial and the war cemetery at Vyšný Komárnik.

In the broader picture of the war, the battle for the Dukla Pass was the largest operation of the autumn of 1944 on the southern sector of the front in Poland. It closed the campaign begun by the summer Lwów–Sandomierz offensive and froze the front in the Carpathians for several months. The Red Army resumed operations here only during the January offensive of 1945, when the Germans, threatened with encirclement, abandoned of their own accord the lines for which tens of thousands of soldiers had died in the autumn.